The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with 'the thing that has been', a struggle, as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people's history. And the novelist, at his best, must feel himself heir to a continuous tradition. He must feel himself, as I think Tolstoy did in War and Peace or Sholokov in And Quiet Flows the Don, swimming, struggling, defining himself, in the mainstream of his people's historical drama.